The Days of the Dead

Book excerpt: The Days of the Dead offers a remarkable journey within Mexico's traditional holiday honoring departed ancestors, friends, and family. Each aspect of the multiday festival is carefully explored, from the journey to the cemeteries to spruce up neglected gravesites to the lively marketplace selling breads and candies in the shapes of skulls and skeletons and finally, the peaceful vigil as friends and families crowd the cemeteries to await the arrival of their loved ones through the long night. San Francisco-based photographer John Greenleigh traveled to small towns in Mexico in four different years to document this extraordinary festival. Accompanied by evocative text by cultural scholar Rosalind Rosoff Beimler, the pictures speak eloquently to a ritual that is at once mocking and respectful of death -- and ultimately affirming of human life.